The Wicked Girls (37 page)

Except that she’s not reckoned with Martin. Amber Gordon can wait. For now there’s not a hope of finding her alone; though
he hopes fervently that the company she’s in is giving her hell. The world is full of women with no morals. Jackie Jacobs,
skirt hitched up to show her legs, is just the tip of the iceberg. You can only do one thing at a time. You have to prioritise.
And right now Kirsty Lindsay is his priority. His anger has been building ever since his humiliation in DanceAttack; has become,
once again, a gnawing, living thing. And now he’s had a taste of relief, he also knows the best way to get it.

It won’t be long now, he thinks. She’ll have to come out from behind one of these smug suburban front doors, and then I’ll
know for certain where she lives.

He takes a bite of Scotch egg and reclines the seat so that only the top of his head, baseball cap and celebrity sunglasses
can be seen from the road. He’s enjoyed his preparations, the crafty plans he’s made so that he will not be recognised. Feels
like 007, like MI5 and Andy McNab, adrenalin coursing
through his veins every time someone turns the corner. It may take a while, watching these houses till he identifies which
one is his target’s home, but he’s in no hurry. He’s got it down to a postcode by the surprisingly simple expedient of calling
the
Tribune
and asking for Minty (he remembers the name from overhearing it in the park) on the news desk, and pretending to be a PR
with a goodie bag and only half an address. The fact that he knew she lived in Farnham seemed to be enough to satisfy the
girl.

He polishes off his egg and smoothes out the page.

Deborah looks down on people who read the
Sun
with all the righteous scorn of someone who identifies herself as belonging to the left. She doesn’t know it, but the
Mirror
has gone as big on Whitmouth as its red-top rival, and in the same manner. Speculation, retrospective wisdom from the neighbours
(the same big-gob neighbours they’re reading about in the
Sun
, if only she knew it) and the small amount of information that can be dug up about such anonymous figures as the Seaside
Strangler and his harpy girlfriend. There’s only one thing the country loves better than a nice juicy serial killer, and that’s
a serial killer’s wife. Deborah assumes the frown all right-thinking people have worn all day while wallowing in the sketchy,
blown-up detail, and bites into a custard cream.

Her paper has much the same photo as the one adorning the
Sun
’s front page: dry, straw-like blond hair, dark glasses and a cheesy grin. In this one, though, she’s halfway through raising
her hand to cover her face, so it looks like she’s waving. Who does she think she is? thinks Deborah, and polishes off her
biscuit. Sharon bloody Osbourne?

Weird, she thinks. She looks familiar. Like I know her from somewhere. Not like I’ve seen her picture, though God knows it’s
been smeared across the papers enough in the past couple of days, but like I’ve seen her in real life. There’s something about
the way she’s holding herself, something about the nose and the
jawline, and that bloody great mole on her face. I wonder if I’ve met her? It feels like it. Where was it? Certainly not Whitmouth.
Absent-mindedly, she takes another biscuit from the pack and dunks it in her tea.

I know what it is, she thinks. It’s that bloody mole. I can’t help it. I see a mole like that on a woman and I just immediately
dislike them. Because of Annabel Oldacre, I think of everyone with a mole like that as a killer in disguise. I remember staring
at that mole for hours on end during the trial, watching that little bitch who killed my baby sister get her punishment. It’s
obviously stuck. All the feelings I had are concentrated on that one facial flaw.

But it is
very
like, she thinks, sucking tea through the softened biscuit. It’s even in the same place as hers was.

Martin turns back to the front page. Gordon is all over that one as well. He chews his lip as he looks at her, grinning away
as she walks down the street like she’s going to a party; he’s edited from his interpretation the fact that he was watching
when the pictures were taken. I suppose she likes the attention, he thinks. She’s got her fifteen minutes and she’s making
the most of it. But she’s not like Kirsty. At least she’s not dedicated her life to making sure her lies make their way into
everyone’s homes.

Jim calls in to divert himself from his nerves before his meeting with Lionel Baker. He’s been reading the papers on the train
and Kirsty can practically hear him shaking his head as he tuts over the Whitmouth coverage. ‘That poor woman,’ he says. ‘They’re
crucifying her.’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’

‘You’re the only person who seems to have been even remotely fair.’

‘Yeah. God knows how
that
got past Back Bench.’

She hears the sound of folding paper. Jim always takes revenge on publications that have annoyed him by screwing them up and
dropping them in the bin. She stares out of the window, notices that that damned Russian vine that next door planted three
years ago is sprouting from a hole in the foundations of their shed. Dammit, she thinks. Life’s one long treadmill of fighting
against nature, one way or another.

‘I think I’m going to give up reading the papers,’ he announces. ‘It just seems so … unnecessary. They’re just making things
up as they go along. They don’t know anything, so they’ve just decided to turn this woman into a pantomime villain, to fill
the space till they do. You see them doing it all the time. They just can’t bear to admit they don’t know any more than the
rest of us.’

‘Steady on,’ says Kirsty. ‘And if everyone stops reading them, what am I going to do for a living?’

No one has been able to find out much about the Alleged Strangler himself. There’s maybe a page about him, but in the silly
season a page is not enough. The
Mirror
’s photographer has followed Amber Gordon all the way to Funnland and then to the unremarkable ex-council house she lives
in. There’s a picture of her walking a pair of those yappy, snappy little dogs you usually see tucked under the arms of the
likes of Liza Minnelli. The house is clearly neglected, a wooden board nailed over a window, the flowerbeds trampled and muddy.
Deborah reads the screed below the pictures, and wonders.

In the doorstep picture, the woman is clearly shouting. About my age, thinks Deborah. Maybe a bit younger. I wonder what it’s
like to be her? Did she know? She must have known. You can’t live with someone and not know something like that, surely?

She turns to the ‘making of a murderer’ feature and starts to read.

Martin looks up the road as he scans through the radio channels in search of Radio 2. Some classic pop, that’s what I need.
Classic pop for the classic suburbs.

He’s surprised by the road she chooses to live on. He’d imagined something more modernist, more minimalist, the sort of thing
favoured by Channel 4. A warehouse conversion, all naked brickwork and stark white plaster, or something whose walls are made
of glass. What he hadn’t expected was an ordinary four-up-four-down in a medium-sized garden full of clematis and concrete
dolphins. A series of near-identical 1930s semis, brave little flourishes – a garage, a brickwork turning-circle, a pergola,
a porch – attesting to their owners’ individuality. If she lives somewhere like this, he thinks, she’s probably got a family.
Two girls called something like Jacintha and Phoebe. A Weimaraner.

A dignified Burmese cat stalks out of a drive, sits on the pavement to survey his territory. Yeah, thinks Martin. Too normal.
She’ll have one of those hairless sphinxes, or a Dalmatian. Something stupid and useless, designed to impress fashion victims.

He glances in the rear-view, sees the front door a couple of doors back open and Kirsty Lindsay emerge. She goes over to the
dusty little Renault that sits on the drive and unlocks the door. She looks unguarded, innocent, filled with thought. Martin
slides down in his seat, though there’s not a chance that she will recognise him like this, from behind, and watches as she
scrabbles around in the glove compartment and comes back out brandishing a satnav and its lead. Of course she’s got a satnav,
he thinks. Nice work if you can get it.

Funny, though. It’s the dullest house on the street, covered in wisteria, and that Renault’s eight years old if it’s a day.
He would have bet his weekly budget that she lived in the one with the Jag.

There are more photos of Amber Gordon in the ‘making of a murderer’ feature: the implication clear that her contribution has
been bigger than any other, even though she’s only known him for six of his forty-two years. It seems that there are very
few photos of Victor Cantrell before he met her, just a couple taken in a caravan park in Cornwall where he worked before
he came to Whitmouth. Deborah feels another twinge of visceral dislike as she eyes the woman. It’s that bloody mole, she thinks.
It really is identical: same place, same shape, same colour. What are the odds? How many people can have that same blemish,
in just the same place …

She feels a jerk of realisation … And be the same age?

Deborah hears the breath hiss from her body. She grips the sides of the paper in fisted hands, presses her face close to the
image on the page. Oh. My. God. Under the bleach, the twenty-five years, the tense defiance, the celebrity sunglasses. She
still has the same jawline, that same upper lip half the width of its lower twin, the eyebrows heavy and dark and at odds
with the shade of the skin.

It can’t be.

She feels freezing cold. She went to the trial every day, with her mother: the bereaved, the living victims. She stared at
Annabel Oldacre and Jade Walker as she sat on the witness stand on the first day and gave her testimony. They stole my little
sister. I only asked them to take her to the shops, and they kidnapped her. Bitches. Those little bloody bitches. And later,
when she was done, she stared at the backs of their necks, at their profiles as they looked up at their lawyers (they never
looked at each other, not once through the whole four days); glaring into their faces, willing them to look at her as they
passed in and out of the
courtroom, willing them to see what they’d done. She memorised everything about Annabel Oldacre, but she never expected to
see her again, with or without the changes of a quarter-century disguising the child within.

‘Fuck,’ says Deborah, and reaches out for the telephone. ‘Fuck.’

They’re heckling the politicians on
Question Time
when her phone starts to ring in her bag. She considers not answering. Jim’s had a good day. He’s come home full of hope
and
grand cru
Chablis consumed at the Paternoster Square Corney & Barrow, and it’s raised her own mood for the first time in days. She
doesn’t want the world intruding any more. Wants to pretend, for this night at least, that life is sweet, and calm, and hopeful.
Then she answers anyway.

Crackling, then shouting, down the line. ‘Hello? Hello?’

‘Stan?’

‘Hello?’ he yells again, then swears. ‘Hang on.’

She waits. His voice comes on, quieter, clearer. ‘Bloody hands-free,’ he says. ‘How are you?’

‘OK,’ she says. ‘You?’

He doesn’t bother to answer. ‘Where are you?’

‘Home,’ she says.

‘I’d’ve thought you’d’ve been down at Whitmouth.’

‘No. Dave Park’s taken over there now. I’m home.’

‘Shit,’ he says. ‘Dave bloody Park.’

‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘I think I’ve had my fill of Whitmouth, truth be told.’

‘Sod it,’ he says. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got his phone number, have you? No, don’t worry. It doesn’t matter.’

‘OK,’ she says. Shrugs pointlessly.

‘Anyway, it was you I wanted,’ he says.

Jim is frowning, and fiddling with the remote. He hates people talking on the phone while the telly’s on. Any second now,
he’ll turn the volume up to make his point. She gets off the sofa and takes the call through to the hall. Plonks herself at
the foot of the stairs, by the pile of laundry that always sits there, and starts sorting socks.

‘I was hoping,’ continues Stan, ‘we could do an information swap.’

‘Uh-huh?’ she asks.

‘I’m on my way down there now. For the
Mirror
.’

‘The
Mirror
? For real?’

‘Yeah, well,’ he says, ‘all they’ve got down there at the moment is some twelve-year-old on work experience. The rest are
all chasing Jodie Marsh or something. They thought they might need someone with a bit more experience for this.’

‘This?’

‘Shit,’ he says. ‘Are you not checking the wires?’

‘Not since teatime. I’m off duty.’

She hears a twitch of astonishment. Stan’s never off duty. He’d be seeking out the broadband in intensive care. ‘Right. Well,
there’s something come up,’ he says. ‘The
Mirror
’s got it as an exclusive, in that they’ve got the dobber on retainer ’cause that’s where she saw the photos and made the
connection, but it’s been up on PA for an hour or so now. It’ll be everywhere tomorrow.’

Get to the point, Stan. ‘Uh-huh?’

‘Someone’s rung in and the whole Cantrell story’s gone a lot bigger. I need … you know. Her number, if you’ve got it. You
know, ’cause you …’

‘Stan,’ she interrupts, ‘what are you on about?’

‘I’m going down to doorstep Amber Gordon,’ he says. ‘I’m giving you the heads-up. I thought you might want to come too. Being
as … you know, you’re a mate. And freelancers have to stick together, sometimes, and I owe you a couple. And because
I think I might need a chick. They all seem to think that doorstepping’s just a question of sticking it out for longer than
anyone else, but sometimes, you know, you just need a woman, not a man, and …’